​Distance Education Dashboard

Historical data suggest that the human footprint of SDBOR’s distance education offerings is large, and continues to grow. A range of measures – from student participation to course offerings – have shown evidence of strong growth in recent years. Understanding and managing this growth is an important activity for the university system.

The SDBOR Distance Education Dashboard provides an interactive summary of student and course section data with reference to the state’s distance delivery system. The goal of the dashboard is to offer a tool for evaluating the overall performance of this rapidly developing network. Consequently, the dashboard considers a variety of data points, including student characteristics, participation indicators, enrollment histories, course offerings, and delivery methods. Comparative data also are provided for the university system’s three university center locations.

Looking at data from the most recent fall term, it can be seen that distance education had another year of robust expansion in Fall 2016. Specifically:

A total of 15,790 students enrolled in at least one regental distance course in Fall 2017, up 8.1 percent from the year prior.

The number of regental course sections offered by distance rose slightly to 1,451 in Fall 2017, an increase of 4.5 percent from the previous year.

Altogether, over 28,000 enrollments were recorded in distance-based sections in Fall 2017, generating more than 78,000 credit hours.

Records were queried under the following definition of distance delivery: Delivery method ≠ 001 (or) 028 (or) 050. While this report focuses mainly on courses delivered by distance, it also makes occasional reference to courses offered at main campuses and at university centers. However, while distance, on-campus, and university center data are depicted in this report as representing separate delivery options, some data unavoidably overlap these categories. For example, a DDN course transmitted from the USD main campus can be defined as both a main campus course and a distance course.

All student counts are unduplicated by term, with the exception of academic program tabulations, which are duplicated by academic program.

Sections counts represent a tally of total sections (including all cross-listed sections) offered in a given term.

For more information, please see the latest SDBOR distance education narrative report, available
HERE.